Keep it Standard, Stupid

For the agentic age I’m overloading the KISS programming tenet with ‘Keep it STANDARD, Stupid’. I’ve long been a proponent of being aggressively vanilla🍦. No, I’m not a Coldplay fan – I’m talking about software projects.

Avoid the urge to go off-piste on a whim because you “know better than the framework developers”. We’ve all been there and spoiler: you almost certainly don’t. Nice boring standard makes life much easier for new colleagues to hit the ground running, reduces maintenance burden and has much better interoperability with 3rd party packages and tools you might like to leverage. Your upgrade paths are also likely be way less toe-curling.

In the age of AI being aggressively vanilla is doubly important with your digital pair-programmer fire-hosing code into your project. They’ll happily use your weird customisations as guidelines turning that “10X development” 😉 into “10X technical debt”. In my experience you’ll also get far more idiomatic results in fewer iterations, making development a whole lot more productive and enjoyable 💜.